Across the Ocean, Across the Tracks: Visualizing “Global Poverty” in the Cold War World

This paper explores the way in which American intellectuals and policymakers constructed a visual vocabulary of “underdevelopment” at home and abroad in the 1960s. Relying upon still and moving images produced and distributed under the aegis of the United States government—including the Academy Award-winning documentary, A Year Towards Tomorrow—as well as poverty “travelogues” written by Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) volunteers, I argue that poverty at home and abroad came to be seen in spatial and temporal terms that transcended geographic particularity and unique national experience. Through an analysis of the visual and rhetorical tropes these media deployed, this paper explores the ways in which poverty as a social problem was re-imagined in the context of the modernization and development project that the United States had undertaken in 1949 and that had blossomed into what President John F. Kennedy declared to be the “Decade of Development.”  I assert that by eliding the differences between rural and urban poverty, and diagnosing the problem in the psychological and cultural terms of “underdevelopment,” midcentury policymakers and social critics collapsed the distinctions that intellectuals and reformers had long believed separated the causes of poverty in industrial and in pre-industrial societies. Recognizing the role that visual representations of the poor have played in America’s long “struggle against poverty,” this project seeks to extend the narrative into the Cold War era so that we might contend more fully with the place of social problems in the history of the “American Century.”